A shadowy Bermudan company that has funneled tens of millions of dollars to anti-fracking environmentalist groups in the United States is run by executives with deep ties to Russian oil interests and offshore money laundering schemes involving members of President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.

One of those executives, Nicholas Hoskins, is a director at a hedge fund management firm that has invested heavily in Russian oil and gas. He is also senior counsel at the Bermudan law firm Wakefield Quin and the vice president of a London-based investment firm whose president until recently chaired the board of the state-owned Russian oil company Rosneft.

In addition to those roles, Hoskins is a director at a company called Klein Ltd. No one knows where that firm’s money comes from. Its only publicly documented activities have been transfers of $23 million to U.S. environmentalist groups that push policies that would hamstring surging American oil and gas production, which has hurt Russia’s energy-reliant economy. Continue reading →

World events have made it quite clear to most Americans that we should develop more of our own energy sources. Reducing our reliance on foreign oil by exploiting the natural gas under our feet is not only smart foreign policy but also smart environmental policy: Natural gas burns cleaner than coal or oil, and it has already lowered our CO2 emissions. Natural gas is a win for America and the planet.

But not according to anti-technology environmentalists, who have made all sorts of wild, unsubstantiated claims about the supposed harms of fracking. Three claims in particular are worth examining: (1) Fracking causes a dangerous leakage of methane into drinking water; (2) Fracking causes earthquakes; and (3) Fracking chemicals contaminate drinking water. Continue reading →

The United States has become the largest producer of oil and natural gas in the world, surpassing Russia and Saudi Arabia, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

You may have missed this important story. That’s because the media virtually ignored it.

How did the United States reach this goal? Two simple words, which were excluded from the Department of Energy press release and the single U.S. news report I found: hydraulic fracturing, better known as “fracking.”

Fracking has become a dirty word in much of the media because of protests from environmentalists and Hollywood stars about the unproven charges of water contamination and environmental damage. Continue reading →

CBS News – A landmark federal study on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, shows no evidence that chemicals from the natural gas drilling process moved up to contaminate drinking water aquifers at a western Pennsylvania drilling site, the Department of Energy told The Associated Press.

After a year of monitoring, the researchers found that the chemical-laced fluids used to free gas trapped deep below the surface stayed thousands of feet below the shallower areas that supply drinking water, geologist Richard Hammack said.

Although the results are preliminary — the study is still ongoing — they are a boost to a natural gas industry that has fought complaints from environmental groups and property owners who call fracking dangerous. Continue reading →

Gasland Part II, the sequel to director/activist Josh Fox’s earlier anti-fracking docudrama Gasland, will run on HBO. It appears to have rounded up the usual corporate villains and appealing victims of profit-hungry capitalist skullduggery, rather than telling the more substantial story: that fracking combined with horizontal drilling has unleashed a bonanza of cheap natural gas.

Fracking involves injecting pressurized water combined with sand and small amounts of chemicals to crack open shale rocks so that they will release trapped natural gas. Generally, the shale rocks are thousands of feet below the aquifers from which people draw drinking water. Continue reading →

“Frederick Hayek dealt with all this in his 1940s classic, The Road to Serfdom, and it’s amazing how you have to keep going over the same old arguments because the impulse toward the ‘planned economy’ never ends.”

by William Tucker

Former Senators Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, and Byron Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, have teamed up to form a Bipartisan Policy Center that is putting out the word that what we is need a Bipartisan National Energy Plan.

As an editor at RealClearEnergy, I must admit I see this story about twice a day. Every editorial writer in creation has already written his piece about how we need a National Energy Plan. But bipartisan, hey that must be something new, right? The two parties working together? That will do the trick, no?

Well, no. You see the whole idea of a National Energy Plan is that decisions will be made in Washington. Then the word will go out telling everyone what to do. The one thing you can be certain of is that if decisions are made in Washington, not much of anything will get done and the whole thing will become politicized.

Take nuclear energy, for example. What we have today in the nuclear industry is essentially a huge monopoly organization run out of Nuclear Regulatory Commission headquarters in Rockville, Maryland. It’s impossible to get anything done today in the nuclear industry without clearing it first through headquarters. Continue reading →

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Frontiers of Freedom, founded in 1995 by U.S. Senator Malcolm Wallop, is an educational foundation whose mission is to promote the principles of individual freedom, peace through strength, limited government, ...